interrupted him. "But go on."

Brenton's lips shut hard together for a minute. Then he did go on, and
in a totally different voice.

"When I look myself squarely in the face, Whittenden, I find I can
assent to just two points, no more."

"And they?"

"God. Universal law."

"So far, so good. And man?" Whittenden queried.

"Their corollary."

"Exactly." Whittenden walked on in silence for a little way. "Well,
what else do you want, Brenton?" he inquired.

"Nothing. My people, however, want a great deal more."

"How do you know?"

"Our ritual."

"Can't you interpret it with any common sense?" The impatience again
was manifest.

"Not in common honesty." And Brenton lifted up his chin.

A little laugh came to his companion's lips and eyes.

"Why not?" he queried. "You don't expect our public schools to abandon
the Aeneid and Homer, because they don't consider the old mythologies
accurate history. You don't expect to give up the best of Hafiz and
Omar, because you also come in contact with the worst of them. We'd be
poorer, all our lives, by just so much. In the same way, why can't you
take the best of our theologies as fact and love it, and, at the same
time, keep a certain respect for the rest of them that you don't
believe, the sort of respect you give an aged ancestor, a respect for
what they have been to the world at large, not for what they are now to
you? Belief, in the last analysis, is nothing but well-applied common
sense."

It was a long time before either of the men spoke again. In the end,
Whittenden broke the silence.

"Brenton, I'd have given a good deal to have known your parents," he
said.

"To weigh me up?" Brenton smiled. "You saw my mother: a strong,
self-reliant, self-willed character, threaded through and through with
Calvinism. She was totally unselfish, yet totally self-centred. In the
same way, she was always on a battleground between the claims of her
own rampant freewill and her sanctified belief in predestination. It's
not an easy thing to analyze her."

"And your father?"

Brenton coloured hotly.

"I was only ten days old, when he died, Whittenden; but the tradition
has come down to me. If he hadn't been so weak, so totally
self-indulgent, he'd have been a genius. Even in the worst of his
self-indulgence, he had ten times my mother's logic. If he had had one
tenth of her will power, he'd have counted. As it was, though,--utter
annihilation. He died, and left no recor